With this allusion to the play so enthusiastically mentioned by Claude in his letter, she pushed René out of her room, and as she closed the door broke out once more into silvery but cruel, mocking laughter--laughter that was a strange mixture of affectation and hatred, of a courtesan's nonchalance and the vengeance of a slighted mistress. CHAPTER XVI THE STORY OF A SUSPICION 'What a wicked woman! What a wicked woman!' muttered René as he went down the staircase, now re-echoing with the shouts of the call-boy. He trembled with agitation and asked himself, 'What harm have I ever done her?' forgetting that for a quarter of an hour he had represented Claude in Colette's eyes. Perhaps the joy felt by the actress in wounding him to the quick might have had its rise in the malice often occasioned by a man's unwillingness to pay his friend's mistress attentions. The loyalty of one man to another ranks amongst the sentiments most odious to women. 'What have I done to her?' repeated the poet, unable to find an answer to his question, unable even to collect his thoughts. There are phrases which, flung at us unexpectedly, will stun us as surely as any blow physically dealt. They bring about a sudden cessation of all consciousness--a cessation even of pain. René was not quite himself again until he stood in the Place du Palais Royal amid its throng of traffic. The first feeling that animated him was a fit of furious rage against Claude. 'The perfidious wretch!' he cried; 'how could he trust my secret to a creature like that? And such a secret, too! What did he know about it?' A slight blush and a moment's hesitation in uttering her name. 'He thinks that is sufficient evidence upon which to slander a woman he hardly knows, and in the ears, too, of a hussy whose infamy he proclaims from the housetops!'